


The Rest of Your Life

by jjtaylor



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-17
Updated: 2010-02-17
Packaged: 2017-10-07 08:28:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/63272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jjtaylor/pseuds/jjtaylor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Doomsday. Rose has a whole new life, and it's not really that much different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rest of Your Life

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Polski available: [Reszta twojego życia](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1025045) by [otemporaetmores](https://archiveofourown.org/users/otemporaetmores/pseuds/otemporaetmores)



> This story was originally posted June 10, 2007. Thanks to wildgreentide for beta.

No one here puts milk in their coffee. In fact, Rose isn't even sure milk exists in this world, or if it does, no one considers it food. She can't find it in the markets anywhere. All they have is this flavored syrup that's not really like milk at all, but everyone pours it over their cereal and into their coffee and Rose can't stand the taste of it.

There aren't really that many things different about this place. There's a dog named Rose and her parents are together. Mickey's grandmother is alive and Rose has a baby brother and there are zeppelins in the skies. But there's no milk, not anywhere.

Everyone wears name badges at Torchwood that make them all look very official. Rose clips hers to her shirt every morning and wonders why she doesn't have a title. Her mother has a title: Jackie Tyler, consultant, which means lots of people ask for her opinion and Rose doesn't think there could have been a more perfect job for her Mum. Mickey has a title, Special Advance League, which mostly means he travels around disabling Cybermen bases. Rose is surrounded by Advanced Assistants and Head Astrophysicists and Lieutenant Archeologists and she should feel out of her element except that she's met more aliens than all of them combined. She's traveled with the Doctor, and half the time she can't even explain the things she's seen, strange, gorgeous things that are special just because they're on another world.

She wonders if it's just that no one knows what to call her. No one knows what her area of expertise really is and so they just call her Rose, the one who used to travel with that strange man who showed up here one day, saved the world, and was gone the next. They were both wanderers but now Rose is here when there's trouble. She's the one they call on when they don't know what else to do.

Sometimes Torchwood is amazing and sometimes it's just like the shop. She gets up every morning, takes the train, makes a cup of coffee – black with lots of sugar - and sits down at her desk. Some days there are aliens and they take the Torchwood SUV out into the country and sometimes she sits through meetings about how much of their budget they should allot for office supplies.

And sometimes the trouble runs with a thundering gallop right past Rose's desk.

She was talking with Ted, whose name badge says he's an Assistant Researcher in Alien Chemicals. He's handsome and blond with the sort of hair that makes Rose want to reach out and brush her fingers through it. She'd been thinking it might not be so bad to go out for a drink with Ted, no commitments or anything, just give it a try and have fun for a night.

She's pressed into the corner with him now, having ducked out of the path of projectile copy machine, her hair stuck in her lip gloss, Ted's crisp suit under her hands, their breathing fast. Ted's thigh is practically between her legs. Her blood is pulsing, her heart pounding, and what looks like a baby giraffe with really large jaws, probably on the loose from the xenobiology wing, is tearing around their office and chewing on the furniture.

Rose grins into Ted's lapel. This is danger, this is trouble, this is fun.

Or at least it should be. When she looks up at Ted, he's pale as a corpse and Rose gives him a little nudge in the ribs. "Trouble?" she says, giving him a grin.

"That thing, out there, it…." Ted goes even paler. "It ate a desk."

"Least it didn't eat you," Rose says. Ted closes his eyes and shudders, and, for a moment, Rose wishes the thing had eaten him.

Sure, she didn't except him to be excited, necessarily, but this was Torchwood, this was their job, to be alien experts and you couldn't really be an alien expert without seeing aliens. You didn't have to go up to them and ask them how their day was, but surely it would be enough that they were there, right there in front of you, stirring up an otherwise completely tedious day at the office.

The truth was that no one at Torchwood got excited the way Rose did, and no one got excited the way the Doctor had when there was trouble. Rose thinks that these people have seen so much less than she has, surely they'd want to see more.

She's standing pressed against Ted, watching the alien giraffe knocks over a trash can with its gangly legs, and Rose hasn't longed to travel so much since she and the Doctor were first separated. It wells up in her, rips through her, like the roar of the alien, who, when Rose peeks around the corner and around Ted's trembling shoulders, is now spinning around in an office chair. She looks at Ted again, and then watches the alien spin and spin and spin until suddenly it topples over, too dizzy to move.

Rose laughs until her stomach aches, until the xenobiologists with their lab coats askew appear, and trap the creature in a sonic net, until one of the other office girls comes over to Ted and fusses over him and offers to get him a glass of water. Rose laughs until she cries, and then she cries, on her knees behind a filing cabinet with a dozen green slips poking out of the bent drawer.

When she gets home, Mickey asks her if she was there when the space giraffe tore out of one of the labs and wrecked the office. She tells him, no, she was out, and has to listen to him talk about how great it was, a real alien, too bad she missed it. Too bad, she agreed, too bad she missed it.

  
Rose gets very comfortable in her sorrow, wearing it like pajamas on a sick day. Except that she has never had a sick day from Torchwood. The only thing that would actually be time off for Rose would be returning to her own Universe and finding the Doctor again. Standing still, always in one place, is much harder work, and she's had no relief from it.

Still, she takes a day off once in a while to wander around downtown. One day, she sees Sarah Jane Smith in a shop, trying on a pair of green large-stitch fingerless gloves that are only meant to be worn by fifteen-year-old girls who have no real need to keep their hands warm. She can tell from Sarah Jane's face that she think they're cute but she's not sure they look right. She keeps holding out her hand, as though waiting for the gloves to suddenly become a part of her skin.

Rose is already walking up to her when she realizes that this is not the same Sarah Jane who traveled with the Doctor. This Sarah Jane hasn't met the Doctor at all, and certainly has never met Rose. This Sarah Jane has never told Rose to come and see her, if she ever needed to, after. After a part of her life was over. After she'd been left alone.

She is already too close and Sarah Jane looks up at her with a warm smile, and so she says, "They're nice. A good colour. Just…."

"Not really me?" Sarah Jane laughs at herself very easily. Rose admires it now much more than she did before.

"If you like these, get them." Rose says. "You only live once."

Sarah Jane smiles at her, and then narrows her eyes a bit. "You seem incredibly familiar."

"Ever seen any aliens?" Rose asks. Sarah Jane's eyes flash and Rose wonders, for a minute, whether there isn't some part of the other Sarah Jane, waiting to be awoken in her. "I work over at Torchwood. People usually don't notice us much in all the commotion, but we stick in their minds more than the aliens do."

"Torchwood? But you're so...."

"Young?" Rose shrugs "I've seen a lot."

"I wish I had," Sarah Jane sets down the gloves and smooths the front of her jacket with a sigh. "I haven't even met a Cyberman. I'm Sarah Jane Smith, by the way."

"Rose Tyler." Rose holds her hand out, and Sarah Jane shakes it.

Rose gets a pain in her chest, and digs her fingernails into her palms as soon as Sarah Jane lets go of her hand. All of her jealousy Rose had held on to, her possessiveness of the Doctor – and now she's looking at a Sarah Jane who never traveled through time, never had a robot dog, never experienced the Doctor's wild grin just for her. This Sarah Jane never had the joy of seeing the universe just get bigger and bigger and bigger.

"Are you all right?" Sarah Jane asks, because Rose is trembling now.

"I am. Yeah, I am." Rose says, and bites her lip. "Fine, really. Need to get back to work."

"Maybe I'll see you again….." Sarah Jane says. The sparkle is in her eyes again. "At my first alien sighting."

"I hope so," Rose says, and smiles, and walks away, feeling incredibly grateful as she walks back to work.

  
She has a fight with Mickey that night, she's not even sure how it gets started. They're both so different now, they fight more than they do anything else. It turns into a fight about the Doctor, as all their fights do sooner or later.

Mickey storms out and Jackie and Pete come rushing to Rose's room and want to know what's wrong and she says nothing, nothing at all, but her mother hugs her anyway, and her father kisses her cheek and Rose closes her eyes so tight she sees stars, but not the right kind.

She hopes that when she opens them again, the Doctor will be there, and he'll take her hand and take her with him again and she'll never have to think about the crushing weight of her ordinary life going on, day after day.

  
Marcie, whose name badge says Technological Archivist, sits two desks behind Rose's. She's heard all about Ted and the giraffe, and she tells Rose she always thought Ted was a wanker, and that Rose was too good for him anyway. "Anyway," Marcie says, "you're still pining over someone."

Rose laughs and fiddles with her name badge.

"Bad break-up, right?" Marcie says. "I know it when I see it, Always looking over your shoulder for someone. So what happened? He break your heart?"

"No, no," Rose says, and she's looking for a way to drop this but Marcie's looking at her with the sort of look Shireen used to give her when she wasn't going to get out without giving away her secret. "We got torn apart," Rose finally says. She sees a flash of the bright white void, the Doctor's 3-D glasses, the coast of Bad Wolf Bay.

"Terrible," Marcie says, nodding sympathetically.

"We just….." Rose doesn't know how to explain it to someone who doesn't know the Doctor. Her Mum and Dad and Mickey, even when Mickey was being thick, they all understood what it meant. "We couldn't stay together. And now there's this…" she thinks of the cold feeling of the wall against her cheek and swallows hard. " There's this divide between us we just can't cross."

"You still miss him?" Marcie says, leaning closer, and Rose thinks she likes Marcie a lot more than she did yesterday.

"Yeah. Think I will all my life."

"Oh, I know exactly what you mean. Some boyfriends are like that. Leave their mark on you. So that's why you came here? Needed a new start?"

Rose chokes and manages to turn it into a laugh. "Yeah. A new start," she says.

"Well, you look like you're doing ok," Marcie says. "Really. You do."

"Thanks," Rose says, and sorts of believes it.

  
And then Rose gets called to deal with a zeppelin full of businessmen who suddenly have tiny little television screens where their eyes used to be and are insistently repeating that they want to take over Britain and then the world. Half the Torchwood team thinks Cybermen, half thinks it's the unidentified ship that's just shown up on the radar. Rose is just glad to be out of the office.

She wonders aloud if there's a way to disrupt the connection and mumbles something about a frequency with a helpful shrug, and thankfully Rose has a team of technology experts who immediately produce an old pair of rabbit ear television antennae at each man's forehead until they remember they were brokering business deals and not negotiating a planet full of brains for sale.

Everything's going swimmingly and Rose hardly has to do anything, and thinks she'll be home in time for her Dad's pot roast and to watch her brother fling carrots across the room while Mickey and her Mum argue about whether or not he can bring his gun into the house for the thousandth time. And then Rose's sight goes blurry and when she opens her eyes, she's looking at an alien who looks a lot more like a squirrel than anything on two feet should. She peers to the side to see if he has a tail.

The alien growls for her attention.

"Sorry, just...." she says. "Nice tail. Am I on your ship now?" Everything is grey and sleek metal and she can't feel the zeppelin underneath her anymore.

"I demand to know why you are undoing my work, human." The alien's voice echoes and Rose feels like she's in a long, dark tunnel. She tells herself to keep calm.

"Oh, so you're the one controlling them. Bit tacky, honestly, with the mobiles, not really that subtle. We thought it was the Cybermen, they've already cornered the electronics market."

"We?" The alien flicks its squirrel tail and wiggles its whiskers.

"Torchwood," Rose says. "You're telling me you don't even know who we are?"

"Your wood torch is no threat to me. I do not fear fire."

Rose tries to stifle her laugh, but she can't.

"Do not laugh at me, human. I will destroy you."

"I'm sorry," she says, still laughing. "It's just, you're hardly the scariest thing that I've ever seen. You're gluing people's mobiles to their face. Your mind control doesn't work on me. Now, leave this planet and go back to your tree house."

The alien stares at her with its beady eyes.

"The Doctor made it seem so easy," she says to herself. She squares her shoulders and takes a deep breath and says, "I'm Rose Tyler and I speak for Torchwood, and planet Earth, and I'm telling you to disconnect your psychic ray and leave these people alone and leave this planet. You're no threat to us and I want you to put me back on the zeppelin and leave."

It works for a minute. The ship around her shimmers and gets blurry and she can hear the voices of the Torchwood team calling her name.

"Well, that went...." she begins to say and then her vision gets blurry. "Something's wrong," she can't quite say, as she starts to sway, her chest tightening.

"I will leave you and your wood torch, Rose Tyler, and I will not look upon it again, but neither will you! Goodbye, Rose Tyler!" The voice fades in an echoing cackle that Rose finds extremely annoying until she passes out.

  
She wakes at home, at the Tyler mansion, with about a dozen extremely fluffy pillows propping her up.

"Oh my god, she's awake!" her mother shrieks when Rose opens her eyes. "Get the alienologist! Call Torchwood! Pete! Mickey!" She hears her brother's shrieks echo her mother's as he squirms on her lap.

"I'm fine," Rose mumbles. "Really, I'm fine."

"You nearly died! The people at Torchwood injected you with all manner of things…" Rose pushes her hair out of her face, and tries to sit up. "They're calling you a hero, and I told them of course, that's my Rose, but what happened? They said you disappeared, and then you came back and you were all blue and they put you in a hyperbaric chamber and…"

"Mum," Rose says. "Mum, stop."

"That's my Rose, saving the earth."

Rose is suddenly incredibly tired and so she closes her eyes and lies back down.

  
When she goes in to Torchwood the next day, everyone's shaking her hand and asking her questions. The xenobiologists are scanning her with strange hand-held devices and the researchers are peppering her with questions and there are people from departments she's never heard of swarming around her for half the morning.

When she gets to her desk, resting on the middle of it is a real name badge. It reads, Rose Tyler, Defender of the Earth.

When the Doctor called her that, she thought it was a joke, because he was the one who defended the Earth. She's not quite sure she believes it's true now, either, but she pins the badge to her chest anyway. And when she gets her coffee, she pours just a little of the milk syrup in it. It's not as bad as when she first tasted it, but it will never be the same as real milk.

Rose remembers when the Doctor first thought they would be parted forever, and he told her to have a fantastic life for him. It turns out that living a normal life for herself is a lot harder to do.


End file.
